“Untold” and “epic” war stories remain a persistent genre, and this should satisfy its substantial readership.
The bestselling authors return with another tale of an elite military unit’s battles and ultimate triumph.
Journalists Drury and Clavin have turned out a steady stream of well-received military histories, including Halsey’s Typhoon, Valley Forge, Blood and Treasure, and Lucky 666, and their latest fits well with their previous titles. Having raced across France after the breakthrough in Normandy, U.S. troops were surprised at the sudden resistance when they crossed into Germany. Among their worst experiences was a nasty November-December 1944 battle in the Hürtgen Forest, a fortified wilderness on the frontier. Historians agree that American leaders mishandled it, sending in units that suffered terrible casualties for minimal gains. Drury and Clavin focus on the final, bloody attack of Castle Hill, toward the end of the campaign, which was ultimately taken by the 2nd Ranger Battalion. Special forces remain controversial among the military because they cost far more than regular troops but don’t fight often and, formed by volunteers, deprive units of their best men. Still, civilians and popular writers find them irresistible. Clearly fascinated by the subject, the authors rewind the clock to deliver the Rangers’ history since its 1942 approval by Gen. George Marshall, inspired by British Commandos. Ranger units distinguished themselves during the invasions of North Africa and Italy and then landed at Normandy in June 1944 before the main force to destroy an artillery emplacement that endangered Omaha Beach. Military buffs will enjoy the authors’ account of the often bitter fighting that followed, described in minute, occasionally excessive detail; the authors vividly capture the miserable, freezing, wet conditions and the bloody small-unit actions that often failed. Drury and Clavin conclude that victory was costly, and the Hürtgen campaign was a mistake: “The American high command knew well…how much blood had been spilled in that woodland to accomplish so little.”
“Untold” and “epic” war stories remain a persistent genre, and this should satisfy its substantial readership.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-24716-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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